14 Ways To Get Unfollowed on Twitter

I just went through a rash of unfollowing- I cut about 25% of you loose.

I finally have been on twitter long enough (a week) and have enough followers (174) to not feel insecure about my number of followers.

Initially, I followed a lot of you- I twubbled you because other cool people were following you. But not all of you have worked out.

I looked at my following list tonight and thought "who the heck are these people?"

You once looked like you might be cool, you might have something to say, but you've remained anonymous and now you've been ejected from the brianstream.

Sorry, it's not you, it's me. Well, maybe it's you. I noticed...

Some criteria that made me more likely to unfollow you-If you want to stay followed by people, you might want to avoid these:

you don't have a photo- ok I'm not unfollowing my CEO but he needs to get an image

you have a weird photo

you're ugly

you look dirty. just kidding. no, seriously- dirt is bad.

you have a dumb image, like maybe a spiderweb, instead of your face

you look pretentious but don't back it up with cool tweets

haven't heard you twitter in the last week

you aren't following me

your photo is of someone famous who's not you

your twitter name includes 'show' or 'network' or 'news' or 'buzz' but you never tweet

your twitter name includes 'affiliate'

you're famous like henry rollins but never tweet

you're a female and your photo makes you look like a porn star

your name is brian. there can only be one brian! just kidding.

Clearly the biggest sin in twitter is never tweeting. I've even kept some semi-annoying people who tweet. I was tempted to remove some famous industry people who haven't been tweeting, like @pierre or @TheGrok just because they don't deserve to be followed because they haven't been tweeting. Why isn't @randfish tweeting. Geez!

Conversely, I'm more likely to keep you if

you tweet and you're not annoying

you look cool

you look nice

you're well known in my industry

you tweet or post useful stuff

you're following me. I may have never heard from you and not even like how you look, but you're a keeper. "you follow me! you really really follow me!"